Discussion

NASA’s Artemis II Crew Launches to the Moon (Official Broadcast)

LorenDB: It's been 54 years since humans last visited the Moon. Hopefully, in a few years we will get boots back on the surface.

hghid: Even though you could question the whole Artemis concept, it's still extremely exciting watching the countdown with my son. I just missed the original Apollo flights and had assumed I would never see a moon landing in my lifetime. We may well not have a landing for quite some time yet, but it's still cool to see a Moon bound rocket standing on the launchpad...

pjmorris: We lived ~60 miles North of the Cape when I was a young boy, and watching the Saturn V's go on the way to the moon was a forming experience.

markus_zhang: Gonna watch with my son if it doesn’t get postponed.

instagib: 4.5hrs to go

rpozarickij: Direct livestream link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf_UjBMIzNo

dotancohen: I tuned in for 60 seconds, the presenter got everything wrong, and I just tuned out until liftoff.She called the top of the ET (well, it's no longer an ET, but it's the stage that was the STS ET) the "upper stage". She said that the propellents are stored at thousands of degrees below zero. And so on. This is a NASA presenter?

chasd00: i'm sure the whole talk track was piped through an AI for clarity and excitement and the presenters were told to read the script.

duped: This opinion may be unpopular here but it's hard to get excited about a colossal waste of taxpayer money after all the damage DOGE did. I don't understand how these NASA missions with questionable scientific value and obscene budgets get off the ground.I mean I do understand, NASA funding is important to oligarchs. But still.

chasd00: I lived in Port Orange FL until i was 12, during night launches my dad would take the family to New Smyrna Beach or some where a short drive South where we watched the shuttles come up over the water somehow. I can't remember the details it was a lonnnng time ago haha. I do remember the launches sounding like popcorn popping.I live in Dallas now and will be turning 50 soon, i want to catch the next Starship launch live but would have to time it perfectly to get time off of work ahead of time.

dotancohen: Hopefully, in a few years we will figure out that hydrogen rockets can not reliably launch on time and we'll switch to less leaky fuels. Then maybe we won't need to pull 40 year old engines out of museums to dump in the ocean.I'm all for human spaceflight, but the Senate Launch System seems the best argument for shutting down human spaceflight programs.

CoastalCoder: Out of curiosity, why do you see this as a worthwhile endeavor?My personal perspective is that the resources are better used for other purposes, but it's possible that I just haven't encountered some compelling reason yet.

chasd00: > Out of curiosity, why do you see this as a worthwhile endeavor?to me it's inspiring and gives people something to cheer for. It also keeps a lot of people employed, productive, and at least has the possibility for new innovation. When looking at the mountains and mountains of wasted taxpayer dollars I dislike these the least.

rdevilla: You are not the target audience for this sort of presentation. Media directed at the laity is more about being directionally than quantifiably correct, and is full of metaphor and embellishment to capture the imagination rather than communicate something with precision.People who want the actual details and numbers will read.

erelong: predicting malfunctioning systems (just a guess)

barbazoo: polymarket or gtfo :)

chasd00: My opinion is 60/40 in favor of launch today. It's not unusual at all for something to come up in the final 10-30 minutes.Kalshi is more optimistic. https://kalshi.com/markets/kxartemisii/artemis-ii-launch-dat...

jcon321: too windy outside for this to happen imo

_moof: You better run over there and let them know.

_moof: Go take a look at how much this costs compared to the rest of the federal budget. I think you'll be surprised by how little money NASA gets.Now, the military...

floxy: I want humanity to continue to be explorers. The Moon is a good next thing, then asteroid mining, humans on Mars and Venus, and eventually colonizing the Milky Way.

rogerrogerr: What is your opinion based on?

lp0_on_fire: Artemis was already set in stone well before DOGE came about and IMO if the federal government is going to set mountains of cash on fire I'd rather it be to NASA than half the crap the government wastes every year.

glimshe: I'm just SO HAPPY we can talk about something that doesn't involve the Iran war, ICE etc. This is a really historic moment, I hope that the current and future administrations continue investing in space exploration. I've waited my whole life for this as the entire "action" happened before I was born. Hubble/James Webb/ISS are cool but Artemis is something else!

amykhar: Fingers crossed that this https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly.... doesn't have any effect.

adamsb6: It is a bit chilling to watch these astronaut profiles having just read yesterday about the heat shield issues observed on the prior mission, and that this will be the first time we can test the heat shield in the actual pressures and temperatures that it will have to endure.Godspeed crew of Artemis II.

lp0_on_fire: It's even more exciting when you realize that the last crewed mission beyond Low Earth Orbit was 1972 and each person on that spacecraft today are younger than that.

qingcharles: I don't know if it's feasible for you, but if you can, try to take your kid to see a live rocket launch. The TV is grossly unable to display how awesome these things are in person.

robotresearcher: I firmly believe you can have both exciting, inspiring, and factually correct communication if you make that a priority.The experience of hearing factual things presented with passion and obvious expertise is in itself inspiring. Why settle for less?

nancyminusone: Do you watch sports, football, the Olympics? If not I'm sure you know someone who does. Same category as this. Each of the 32 NFL team is worth about the cost of 1-2 Artemis launches. The entire league could fund the whole Artemis program nearly twice. Hosting the Olympics is worth about 3-10 launches.Like sports, the objective is ultimately useless except as a showcase of what humanity has to offer, and people like to see that.

ApolloFortyNine: Even if you think Space travel is worth the money (which I personally do), adding humans to the mix makes projects incredibly more expensive. Even in the realm of space travel and research, sending humans is a questionable use of the money.

jcon321: walking outside, and the surf report... they cancel all the time for less wind shear

proee: There is a LOC (Loss of Crew) number that is typically calculated for these missions. I'm curious what that is? Early Apollo missions were on the order of 4%.

WalterBright: After the moon landing, Armstrong allowed that he had estimated the survivability at 50%.

jeffrallen: [delayed]

LogicFailsMe: Because inevitably the Earth will have yet another ELE. And it's a better use of tax dollars than warmongering, YMMV.

willis936: That was the intent of the piece. It is impossible to assess the true intent of such a piece when it so blatantly is asking for attention.

hypeatei: It's quite telling that all the replies you're getting are about "hope" and "jobs" with no actual scientific reason. I guess we're taxing people for vanity space missions and jobs programs. Makes sense.

_DeadFred_: I personally find the grind easier when there also big things happening. You can't just cook the same, most basic, cheapest meal every day for your family and expect them to be happy. Who wants to join a club that doesn't do anything interesting? Same with society. It sometimes needs to dream, to aspire and inspire. To lift peoples head from the toil and look up.

runarberg: I think there is a major difference though. Sports events are not pretending to be anything else. The Artemis mission claims to be advancing science and claims to be a stepping stone for an eventual moon base and a manned mission to Mars. I personally have serious questions about all of these.

foltik: Do you really disagree that it’s advancing science? Surely actually testing hardware, building knowledge on how to run this type of mission, learning to use lunar resources, figuring out how to keep people alive, etc. will teach us things we couldn’t learn any other way.Fwiw do share your concerns about the methods (sending humans on this specific mission is questionable, SLS is questionable compared to SpaceX approach).

dylan604: How many days of a war with Iran could be funded with the Artemis budget?

ordu: > My personal perspective is that the resources are better used for other purposes, but it's possible that I just haven't encountered some compelling reason yet.Well, people are often obsessed with rationality, and seek reasons to do something, but there is one reason that works almost for anything: just because. If we want to go forward, we'd better try a lot of things, including those that do not look very promising. We don't know the future, the only way to uncover it is to try. Did you hear about gradient descent? It is an algo for finding local maxima and to do its work it needs to calculate partial derivatives to choose where to go next. In reality doing things and measuring things are sometimes indistinguishable. So society would better try to move in all directions at once.A lot of people believe that to fly to the Moon is a good idea. Maybe they believe it due to emotional reasons, but it is good enough for me, because it allows to concentrate enough resources to do it.> the resources are better used for other purposesIt is much better use for $$$ than the war with Iran. I believe that the war have eaten more then Artemis already, and... Voltaire said "perfect is an enemy of good". The Moon maybe not the perfect way to use resources, but it is good at least.

WalterBright: Before the Apollo launch, von Braun was asked what the reliability of the rocket was. He asked 6 of his lieutenants if it was ready to fly. Each replied "nein". Von Braun reported that it had six nines of reliability.

jedberg: I'm assuming this is fake but it's hilarious.

dylan604: It is one of the things I regret not ever getting to see a shuttle launch. The closest I ever got was when I flew over Florida while a shuttle was on the pad.

zimpenfish: Found a stream on YouTube earlier (which presumably wasn't an official one because it disappeared 15 minutes later after a claim by "FUBO TV") and it had a poll attached: "Will the Artemis astronauts land on the moon?"40% of people had voted yes. Which is somewhat worrying given the mission plan and hardware.

duped: My point is that DOGE killed a bunch of government programs that help people while saving no money, yet this giant waste of money survived. Cancelling Artemis II alone in favor of III would save a billion dollars by itself.

bee_rider: I don’t have any questions about a mission to Mars, it is a stupid and pointless trip that I don’t want to ask any questions about.The Moon, I dunno, it’s at least in Earth’s gravity well so it isn’t like we’re going totally the wrong direction when we go there, right?At best it could be a gas station on the trip to somewhere interesting like the Asteroid belt, though.

runarberg: Whether a moon base is needed or even beneficial is a question I have not heard a convincing answer in favor. And even if moon base is indeed needed and/or beneficial to future space exploration / resource extraction why robots cannot more efficiently build (or assemble) such a moon base is another question I need an answer to.We are sending humans to (or around) the moon now, but it may just turn out to be a wasted effort, done solely for the opulence (or more cynically bragging rights / nationalist propaganda).

sarchertech: We are nowhere near the capability to launch robots to the moon that can autonomously build or assemble a moon base for any useful definition of moon base.

lukan: Is that a real fact?

kakacik: The date checks

WalterBright: From "Apollo The Race to the Moon" pg 102:The joke that made the rounds of NASA was that the Saturn V had a reliability rating of .9999. In the story, a group from headquarters goes down to Marshall and asks Wernher von Braun how reliable the Saturn is going to be. Von Braun turns to four of his lieutenants and asks, "Is there any reason why it won't work?" to which they answer: "Nein." "Nein." "Nein." "Nein." Von Braun then says to the men from headquarters, "Gentlemen, I have a reliability of four nines."

ReptileMan: Safe trip to the crew. I do hope that they have ironed out all the issues.

1970-01-01: You're supposed to have peanuts, not popcorn, tonight:https://science.nasa.gov/missions/what-are-jpls-lucky-peanut...

malfist: The official minimum standard is 1:270

baggy_trough: Hilarious!